Bio-Tope is like the extra shot in your morning coffee. What we’ve got in there is organic compost and biochar, and then fertilizers, mycorrhizae, and rock powders — all of the things that we’ve learned to put into our soil. They have been put in there, too, so that they can eventually become a finished, rich soil amendment.

Instead of just using straight, natural fertilizer and applying that to your existing soil, you could use Bio-Tope as a top dressing or mix it into your tired soil that needs to be replenished. It’ll give you everything that you need to get your plants started or get them growing.

You can actually use Bio-Tope in place of fertilizer. It is essentially a natural fertilizer, but you also get the benefits of the compost and the biochar. If you use it as a top dressing, it’ll really keep the moisture in your soil. The biochar will provide a permanent home for beneficial microbes as it slowly breaks down. The compost breaks down more quickly than the biochar, as it provides food for the beneficial microbes that live in the biochar. This prolongs the effectiveness of the compost.

We add biochar to stabilize the soil structure and to help with water retention capacity. It’s really good at distributing water throughout your soil. So, if you have soil that doesn’t do a great job of retaining water, biochar helps.

Most people know to add compost to their existing garden beds, but they might not know exactly why it helps; it helps because it reintroduces a microbial population to your soil. It doesn’t necessarily provide nutrients for your plants, so a lot of people add fertilizer along with compost. What we’ve done is eliminated the extra step and combined the two in our Bio-Tope product.

In order to be effective fertilizers need to be broken down a certain amount so that they’re accessible to plants and microbes; our all-natural compost helps with that. Since the two coexist in Bio-Tope, the nutrients are already accessible to your plants the minute you add it to your soil; your plants can absorb it much quicker.

Bio-Tope is so efficient that we decided to make it a stand-alone product. We also use it as the mechanism for getting natural fertilizers into the Opus Grows mixes, in addition to the multiple fertilizer packs that we add to the mixes.